english is a gorgeous language
by burningjackets
Summary: The Doctor's thoughts on the difference between words on Gallifrey and words on Earth. Also, love.


**Another eleven/rory thing, hope you're not getting tired of me! Characters belong to Stephen Moffat. **

English is a gorgeous language, if the Doctor said so himself.

Full of giant, warm words like _sunshine _and _carnival _and _cotton candy_; and of words like _needles _and _murder_ knock about in your heart, leaving you breathless and sad.

In Gallifreyan, no such words existed. Love felt stark and sanitary on his tongue, like a hospital. Dreams felt stupid, and hope felt like an impossible thing, even to impossible-isn't-in-our-vocabulary Time Lords.

What was different about English, and _wondrous _and _whimsical _and _absolutely brilliant, _was that it was too difficult, too filled with emotion.

_I love you_ was a technicality on Gallifrey. _I love you _was a whisper on someone's lips, the subject of manic late-night dreams and the longing of the 3 little words that meant the moon and the stars, meant jumping off buildings and clinging, clinging to sweet disbelief.

_I hate you_ was normal on Gallifrey, with the skies filled with war and final, deal-making handshakes in the blackest midnight, promising freedom or money or a mouth at your temple, while _I hate you_ was another pair of 3 little words to be snarled, to be yelled into a pillow or to say to a dear friend when they do something to embarrass you over coffee.

_Life_ was the purest white, and _Death _was that starless midnight, when people died and he lost.

They were grey on Gallifrey. Bland. Accepted. Sure as the silver leaves on the trees.

English also felt so painfully small; when someone stroked a hand through his hair with warm, warm fingertips or when he stood, alone, awash in moonlight and the sharp stabbings of rain, hitting him like a hammer.

He was speechless when he was kissed or was punched, always scrambled to finds words and definitions to describe emotion and love and pain and loneliness and that over-bearing feeling of being too alive, too alive to be standing over a pale body of someone he had loved.

Words betrayed him, in that sense. Words twisted up his insides and made him gag, snapped off his tongue while countless evils laughed at the man who was broken inside, who was foolish enough to love a dying man, to love a dying planet.

He deserved worse. He deserved to be stuck in Hell for eternity. He had murdered and sacrificed and been greedy, so greedy with the minds and hearts and eyes of others that it coloured his mind, leaving what was a spectrum of fiery red to a bland, dull glaze of grey.

Grey. Words were grey. Cold. Hadn't war taught him that? Hadn't every single heart he broke taught him that? Hadn't the crying children and the tears of the ones he loved taught him that?

Apparently not. Emotions wreck from the inside out. He couldn't love again, or he risked being the sad mad man, when really, wasn't he supposed to be the happiest? He let his heart beat dormant. He shouldn't love. He couldn't love.

His heart twitched when he saw his man again, restarting. _No,_ he reminded it. _Words will get in the way._

It stubbornly kept twitching, and he fought back tears, cursing those tender words, sentences, paragraphs that threatened to flow out of his mouth and engulf him, that ordered him to surrender in front of that blasted, blasted man who he loved way too much.

He couldn't, so there he stood, crying, with words jamming his tongue and sticking to the roof of his mouth, going back down his throat and circling around his beating hearts, which beat _He's alive he's here he's with me_ which every second and the man stood there, unknowingly making his head beat in time with Mozart's piano, tinkling off in the corner of his mind, where all the memories he was terrified to forget was placed, and he wanted to launch himself at him, opening his mouth to let feelings and heartbreak and the small inkling of hope flood out, wordless.

English was a beautiful, complex language filled with consonants and vowels and words he loved to say, feel his mouth curve around _onomatopoeia _and felt the buzz he got from _fez_ and felt his hearts thud out of his chest with _love. _

But it never compared with_ his_ hands and _his_ eyes, the planets and the nebulas, with the fields and sadness and the heartbreaking sound of the band's final song echoing under the waves, following that sinking ship.

He cried, and words flowed down his cheeks and gathered in the hollows of his cheeks, in the dips of his temples and the parting of his lips. He laughed, and words sang out like bells, budding in the warmth of the hand on his shoulder and in that smile that lingered afterward, words lined his lips and his chin and that fantastic neck and the Doctor wanted to distinguish them all, replacing the adjectives with feeling and adrenaline and that feeling when you go into a warm place on a cold day, when you smell bread baking, when you feel fingers in between yours, warm and throbbing and so alive when he had no right to be.

Who ever said that a picture was worth a thousand words had never seen Rory Williams.

Rory Williams deserved _one million. _

**Review if you want to, you don't have to, but if you do, consider yourself my favourite person.**

**If I don't reply to your review, then I am incredibly stupid and don't deserve you.**


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